Present commercially available cereal noodles can contain non-wheat cereal flours, such as oat flour, buckwheat flour, barley flour, pearl barley flour, rice flour, brown rice flour, and the like, which makes it difficult to form a matrix or net-like structure when making dough from such cereal flours. As a result, such non-wheat cereal flours in present commercially available pasta noodles should be controlled to be in only minor amounts. Otherwise, such pasta noodles with large amounts of non-wheat flour do not have the good mouthfeel or texture that is preferred by customers.
Health considerations generally dictate that it is desirable to ingest at least a minimum amount of both wheat and non-wheat cereal daily. Therefore, it is generally recommended that a person include wheat and a non-wheat cereal, such as oats, as part of a daily diet regimen. There are three major types of wheat: hard wheat, soft wheat and durum wheat. Hard wheat and soft wheat are generally used for baking, while durum wheat is used for pasta noodles, when ground into semolina.
Oat is a nutritious and calorie-proper food ingredient because it contains a great amount of water soluble fibers, β-glucan, proteins, vitamins, and mineral substance. Further, oat-containing food products are known to lower cholesterol. Thus, one may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by consuming oat-containing food products containing more than 3 grams of β-glucan per day, when taken as part of a diet with a low fat and cholesterol content.
However, oat only contains 2 to 6% by weight of β-glucan. Therefore, it is necessary to eat 50 to 150 grams of oat each day in order to ingest 3 grams of β-glucan per day. With such a large requirement, oats become a major part of the diet just to fulfill the requirement of sufficient β-glucan each day, and as a result can be onerous to do so.
Further, it is not possible to ingest enough β-glucan each day from the present commercially available oat-containing food products, such as cookies, breakfast cereals and the like, as such food products do not contain a sufficient amount of oat ingredients.
Therefore, it is highly desirable to have a food product such as a pasta noodle which is easy to chew, and which contains a sufficient amount of the aforesaid wheat and non-wheat cereal.
Conventional noodles contain wheat flour as the main ingredient. Wheat flour usually includes about 9 to 14% by weight protein and 75 to 80% by weight starch as the two main components for forming the structure of the dough.
The protein contained in the wheat flour generally has about 80% of water soluble gluten protein. The gluten protein is mainly composed of glutenin and gliadin. The glutenin is an alkaline soluble protein, and has double sulfur bonds for end linking subunits and providing extensibility for the dough. The gliadin is an alcohol soluble protein, and has intramolecular double bonds for providing elasticity for the dough. Additionally, the protein contained in the wheat flour has about 20% water soluble and salt soluble protein which contains a large amount of thiol amino acid for providing a net-like or matrix structure during the production of the dough.
The starch contained in the wheat flour generally includes about 25% amylose and about 75% amylopectin, comprising two groups of starch when viewed by starch granule size. When wheat flour is used for producing the dough, the aleurone formed by the combination of the starch granule and the protein contained in the wheat flour is decomposed. The starch granules are dispersed and inlaid into the net-like structure so as to form a firm structure with the protein. The dough having a net-like structure is subsequently processed by sheeting, combining, rolling, and cutting to form the pasta noodle.
As stated, pasta noodle is generally made with durum wheat as a main ingredient. Durum wheat and hard or soft wheat are different from each other in chemical composition and physical properties. Although, durum wheat contains a great amount of protein, the gluten thereof has considerable flexibility with thermosetting properties. Furthermore, the gelling property of the starch contained in the durum wheat and the processing conditions for producing pasta noodles are different from those for pasta noodles made from hard or soft wheat. Therefore, the color, taste, texture, and mouthfeel characteristics of durum wheat pasta noodles are different from those of the hard or soft wheat pasta noodles.
As described above, although hard or soft wheat pasta noodles and durum wheat pasta noodles are different in the type of wheat flour and processing conditions, the principles for making the respective pasta noodles are similar, i.e., by forming a net-like structure via the protein and the starch contained in the flour.
Although oat flour contains 12 to 15% by weight of protein, it is devoid of a sufficient proportion of gluten protein for forming the necessary net-like structure during the production of the dough. It is difficult to process the oat dough into conventional pasta noodles by a conventional process and apparatus. Additionally, although the oat dough can be processed into pasta noodles by a pasta machine, pasta noodles made thereby are liable to break easily. Pasta noodles made of oat dough is also liable to become pasty during cooking. A flour composition containing a relatively large amount of non-wheat cereal components, such as oats and the like, and the noodle product produced therefrom have yet to be developed heretofore.